There’s a major fail today for the new science section of the Stuff.co.nz news web site — the web portal for Fairfax NZ, home to The Press (Christchurch) and the Dominion Post (Wellington) newspaper web presences. A front page teaser — “Could cooling sun cause ice age?” (see image at left) — leads to a page with a headline that screams ‘Solar minimum’ could trigger Ice Age [Web Cite]. It’s a short piece that originally began thus:

The world could be heading for a new ‘solar minimum’ period, possibly plummeting the planet into an Ice Age, scientists say. Researchers say the present increase in sun activity with solar flares and storms could be followed by this minimum period.

The period would see a cooling of the planet, refuting predictions of global-warming alarmists.

This alarming introduction, helpfully archived by morgue, has since been rewritten to change the final sentence:

The period would see a cooling of the planet, refuting predictions of further global-warming.

Two small problems for Stuff: “scientists” aren’t saying anything at all about a coming ice age, refuting predictions of global warming, or projecting new solar minima. The paper they’ve based the story on is a lot less exciting, suggesting that there may be a plausible link between changes in solar activity and regional climate a few thousand years ago as measured by varves from a German lake. The story — one of the day’s “top stories” on their iPad app — is made up nonsense. And there’s a second problem: it may have been lifted in part from an earlier item in Britain’s Daily Mail…

When you look at the Stuff piece and the Mail original side by side, it’s clear that the Stuff version owes a great deal to the original article by Rob Waugh. A couple of sentences2 are more or less identical, suggesting that someone at Stuff was guilty of taking a few shortcuts when putting the story together. An unkind person might accuse them of plagiarising someone else’s rubbish, and that’s never a good look, is it?

The people putting Stuff together might want to consider that using the Daily Mail as their newsfeed is not a good idea. It might even make them a laughing stock (h/t David Winter):

It’s an interesting story, but what attracted my attention was that the varves come from the Meerfelder Maar, a remarkable lake that has a detailed annual — even seasonal — record of local climate preserved in its bottom muds, which have been used to date the precise onset of the Younger Dryas cool episode during the warming at the end of the last ice age to 12,679 years BP. Read more in An abrupt wind shift in western Europe at the onset of the Younger Dryas cold period, Brauer et al, Nature Geoscience, Vol 1, August 2008 (pdf).

These two sentences from Stuff: It was first noticed in the 1970s when the American astronomer Jack Eddy noticed a strong correlation between historic weather records and accounts of solar activity. He noticed that a ‘quiet’ sun correlates with cold weather and a ‘manic’ phase means warmer conditions. — are obviously edited out of these lines from the Mail: The link between Solar ‘moods’ and the weather down here on Earth was first noticed in the 1970s, when the American astronomer Jack Eddy noticed a strong correlation between historic weather records and contemporaneous accounts of Solar activity, most notably the long record of sunspots published a century before by the astronomer Edward Maunder. Eddy noticed that a ‘quiet’ Sun correlates with cold weather and a manic phase means warmer conditions.

My inbox in the last month has filled with emails about denier articles in leading New Zealand newspapers. It’s been a veritable crank central across the country. They include the ridiculous opinion piece by Jim Hopkins in the Herald late last year, a similar feature by Bryan Leyland published in both the DomPost and The Press, then, last week, a piece by Chris de Freitas in the Herald, arguing that desertification in Africa isn’t caused by climate change.

Did Leyland and de Freitas, both leading lights in the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, take advantage of newspapers’ lack of feature material over the holiday break and provide some copy to fill the gap?

An insight to the strategy behind our newspapers’ fairly regular publication of our local deniers can be gained from reading a document I came across recently: the Canadian-based International Climate Science [denial] Coalition’s (ICSC) media strategy, originally posted on the front page of its website last year (pdf here).

Titled Winning Hearts and Minds to Climate and Energy Reality, the strategy is designed, apparently, to “help shift public, media and government opinion away from futile attempts to mitigate global climate change.”

How do they plan to achieve this?

“Continued provision of mass media commentary (either directly, or by assisting national CSCs and other allies) via newspaper and magazine opinion articles, letters to the editor, news releases, and radio and TV interviews, and call-ins, as well as private communication with receptive media players.”

The rest are a who’s who of climate denial around the world. One member of the Policy Advisory Board is UK denier David Henderson, brought to New Zealand by the Treasury for a speaking tour in early 2007.

Canadian PR man Tom Harris runs the ICSC. Formerly associated with energy lobby groups and another group that lobbied for the tobacco industry, Harris has been a regular speaker at the Heartland international denier-fests.

The full web of connections between the Kiwi deniers, the ICSC and various US conservative think tanks funded by the fossil fuel industry to run campaigns of climate denial can be seen in this ExxonSecrets map. While Exxon isn’t the only one funding these groups, it’s nevertheless a good way of showing the web of denial the Kiwis are caught up in.

Leyland has already admitted that he was funded by the Heartland Institute to go to the 2007 UN climate talks in Bali — and presumably Heartland also paid for McShane and Gray to attend. Leyland has no climate change credentials at all — he works for the power industry and lobbies against renewable energy. In short, he’s an energy industry lobbyist who hates renewables.

So why do our newspaper editors keep publishing these lobbyists connected with a bunch of US conservative think tanks? The ISCS strategy is not new — this is the same furrow ploughed by inactivists since the early 1990’s. But which of our papers seem to have fallen for these strategies the most? I’ve done some digging back through the archives to see how they’ve been doing.

The NZ Herald is among the worst, right up there with the National Business Review. Setting aside their opinion writers Jim Hopkins and Garth George (who has finally given up this job and moved to the Bay of Plenty), the Herald has repeatedly published the deniers’ screeds.

De Freitas is probably the most-published denier in NZ. He has helpfully listed all of his publications on his website . A quick look through this list produces some interesting numbers: Since 1982, the Herald has published 36 opinion pieces by de Freitas, 12 of them in the five years since the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment in 2007, surpassing even the NBR, which published only four of his pieces in the same timeframe.

The majority of the Herald opinion pieces (24) have been published during the reign of Herald editor Tim Murphy, who took over the helm in 2001 and moved up to editor-in-chief in 2005. It appears that the strategy of pestering editors has been successful, at least with Murphy — I have been told that he publishes them to get the NZCSC off the phone. Looks like he has fallen for the ISCS’s strategy of “private communication with receptive media players”.

Perhaps the most egregious was a feature page last year, with a de Freitas piece given equal weight as one by the Vice President of the Royal Society, Dr Keith Hunter, with the headline: “The Great Climate Debate”. While there are many “great debates” in the world of climate science, the “is it happening or not” debate is only actively promoted by deniers, just as the tobacco industry ran its “doubt” campaign in the ‘60’s.

This week’s effort by de Freitas has been the first under the helm of the new editor, Shayne Currie. Will he continue in the same vein as Murphy and publish de Freitas regularly?

The Herald has also published several articles by Leyland and one by Dunleavy.

Since 1982, the National Business Review has published 35 editorials by de Freitas denying the science of climate change. In a way, you’d expect that, given the NBR’s right-leaning ideology and strong anti-climate stance. Owen McShane has 46 denier articles and Leyland four.

De Freitas has also managed to get four pieces in The Listener, but none since 2008 when his piece, co-authored by Bryan Leyland, landed the magazine in the middle of a furore over the sacking of columnist Dave Hansford after his column revealing Leyland’s payment by the Heartland Institute.

The Dominion Post has been fairly measured, publishing only two of de Freitas’ pieces, but publishing a myriad of Vincent Gray’s letters (again, a strategy pushed by the ICSC). Leylan seems to get a receptive ear in the DomPost’s business section.

The Press has published very little, apart from a few letters – but it regularly quotes Leyland talking about the power industry, with some occasional stories quoting him as an NZCSC spokesman. I strongly suspect the recent Leyland piece was published by an editor standing in for Andrew Holden while he was on holiday.

Talk to the producers of some of the country’s major radio programmes and they will tell you how reluctant they are to host climate scientists because of the wall of vitriol they get from the denier camp every time they mention anything reflecting the mainstream climate science. They, too, are targets of the ICSC’s media strategy, which urges its members and associates to call in to radio shows.

Perhaps it’s time for New Zealand’s editors and producers — and indeed journalism lecturers — to read the work of former Time, Fortune and Businessweek editor/deputy editor Eric Pooley, who authored a 2009 study on climate change reporting in the US for Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Centre on Press and Public Policy. He looks at the “balance as bias” (or “he said she said”) syndrome in reporting on climate change — “a condition in which journalists stick to the role of stenographer, recording two sides of a debate even when the two sides are not of equal merit.”

“Notions of journalistic objectivity…shouldn’t prevent reporters from recognizing consensus and making judgments based on the best available evidence. Instead, they should help the public decide who is right and who is wrong in a debate where the stakes—our economy, our planet—could not be higher.”

Climate change reporting is not simple, but publishing outright lies by deniers is not helping anyone. Time for New Zealand’s newspaper editors to face facts, and refrain from printing lobbyists fantasies.

I put the word “denial” in there because their science is somewhat lacking

]]>https://sciblogs.co.nz/hot-topic/2012/01/16/cranking-it-out-nz-papers-conned-by-denier-media-strategy/feed/0Christchurch Heritage in the Media Againhttps://sciblogs.co.nz/digging-the-dirt/2011/09/27/christchurch-heritage-in-the-media-again/
https://sciblogs.co.nz/digging-the-dirt/2011/09/27/christchurch-heritage-in-the-media-again/#respondTue, 27 Sep 2011 00:32:51 +0000https://sciblogs.co.nz/digging-the-dirt/?p=157 Christchurch heritage is once again in the news with a number of articles published vocalising concern for the current regime of heritage building treatment and demolition.

Unfortunately it sounds all too familiar with the same debates, criticisms and problems as the first time round, voiced in the weeks after the February earthquake by professionals and advocates alike;

The speed of destruction, the lack of care given to heritage fabric during demolition, and poor long term strategies.

The Press, based in Christchurch, has been the loudest voice with 3 articles in the last week, recording dismay and anger at the rate and reasons for destruction, the apparent ineffectiveness of the New Zealand Historic Places Trust (NZHPT), and lessons from overseas experience.

One can only guess at the reason for this new burst of media awareness, but having listened to part of the interview by Kathryn Ryan with Anna Crighton, the Chairperson of the Christchurch Heritage Buildings Fund, on Radio New Zealand this morning, Crighton’s description of Christchurch CBD was extremely sad as she described it as open and flat.

Recent visibility of what a levelled city looks like makes for a striking comparison with Christchurch a year ago, when the historic quarter around High St was full of heritage buildings and character…And as they say, a picture speaks a thousand words.

And a picture can evoke raw emotion and hit you with the reality stick.

Heritage made up a large part of the appeal of Christchurch CBD. Now with varying figures being bandied about regarding the number of buildings that have been and projected to be demolished, the reality may be coming home to more people that, heritage can be an integral part of identity and culture….and it is being lost, fast.

Dr Kit Miyamoto of Miyamoto International brought an international perspective to the heritage question last week. CEO of an engineering firm that has assisted many cities following major natural disasters, including earthquakes in Kobe, Istanbul and Mexico, he has voiced his concern at the numbers of buildings to be demolished.

He and business partner Michael King, are reported as saying that they have seen cities in a far worse situation that Christchurch, and that many of the heritage buildings in the CBD can be saved. Costs are high, but if the heritage fabric of the city is what make Christchurch Christchurch, then every effort should be put in to save this.

They also advocated for opening up the CBD as soon as possible to discourage the ‘doughnut effect’ which sees a lack of investors entering a work space, discouraging still more potential investors.

An equally damning effect on the CBD from the heritage conservation perspective is,

‘as individual buildings are levelled leaving spaces amongst the inner city, these result in increased building decay and damage. Buildings normally protected by their neighbour are exposed to new sources of damage, be it weather or airborne chemicals and particles, accelerating the destruction of already failing buildings.’ (Brigid Gallagher)

Ie. The heritage fabric (the bricks and mortar) that is Christchurch identity, further crumbles on increased exposure.

There needs to be a balance between the use of the CBD, the length of time the CBD is left abandoned, and the numbers of buildings to be demolished or restored.

Underlying this of course is cost and will.

NZHPT, who have been heavily criticised for their apparent apathy this week has replied that emergency powers put in place following the February quake have left them less able to protect. Chairperson, Bruce Chapman has said that the Trust is disappointed in the numbers being demolished, but the way things stand now the decision ‘comes down to the wishes of the owners.’

Of the 176 that NZHPT assessed Chapman says that they have mainly argued for retention rather than demolition. 150+ have however been tagged for partial or full demolition. The Christchurch City Council numbered about 80 listed buildings demolished by the end of July in another article in The Press in August.

Dr Miyamoto was also dismayed at the numbers. Of about 2400 buildings in the CBD area, 1200 (50%) earmarked for demolition is ‘unbelievable’, stating that 10% should be a more realistic number. He says,

‘I don’t understand why this should be. In general your building stock has stood up very well in comparison with other cities and you have good codes and excellent engineers.”

Anna Crighton this morning also remarked that the key to heritage retention and restoration requires the support of the owners. That, and dollars, which is where the Canterbury Earthquake Heritage Building Fund comes in.

So far 2 buildings have been earmarked for restoration, and that more were on the table, ‘as we speak’. The 2 named in the interview were the New City Hotel in Colombo Street and the Masonic Lodge in Lyttleton, both of which have met certain criteria to be eligible for funding. Others apparently will not. There is currently $4.5million available.

Crighton concluded with the opinion that,

those people who did make the decision to apply for heritage building restoration funding and receive it, would be, in the future, in possession a very rare asset.

Dr Miyamoto concluded,

‘New Zealand’s EQC insurance structure is very good and is an exception globally. It gives you a lot of options other countries don’t have,” he says. ‘The city still has the potential to become an international model and provide a blueprint for earthquake recovery. If further demolitions are halted right away he could see as a part of that model the city could distinguish itself with a high retention rate of its unique character base.’

Doesn’t that sound like a good idea for a country world famous for its innovation?

It’s been a shaky week in Christchurch and Canterbury. Another M6.3 shock hit the city on Monday afternoon — renewing the misery for many in the city’s eastern and seaside suburbs, but thankfully not adding to the death toll. Attention has now turned — with some force — to the question of which suburbs should be rebuilt, and an excellent feature by David Williams in last Saturday’s Press on sea level rise and its implications for the rebuilding of Christchurch should cause some pause for thought. Williams interviewed James Hansen during his visit to the city last month (shortly before I did, in fact), and uses Hansen’s views on sea level rise to kick off his discussion:

Hansen says a multi-metre sea level rise is possible this century if greenhouse gas emissions, caused by things such as coal-fired power plants, vehicle engines and agriculture, are not reduced.

Williams goes on to put that into the context of a city where the baseline has shifted:

But the sea-level implications of his predictions are particularly significant for low-lying, quake-hit Christchurch.

The city has two rivers snaking through it and much of it is drained swamp land. As it is, the city’s main surveying marker — a stone in the foyer of the city’s broken Anglican cathedral, 8.5 kilometres from the beach — is barely five metres above the high tide line.

Since the run of earthquaked began last September, the city’s eastern and riverside suburbs are living with a new normal:

Tidal flooding from the Lower Styx River has swamped some Brooklands properties twice a day since the February earthquake.

Last month high-tide flooding hit Christchurch’s river suburbs and residents are anxiously waiting to see if it’s a wet winter.

GNS Science geophysicist John Beavan, of Wellington, has been surveying post-quake Christchurch. He confirms that isolated areas, rather than whole suburbs, have dropped by up to a metre.

Modelling done after the quake – quite a bit of which has been verified by surveying – showed that the Avon- Heathcote Estuary and part of the Port Hills has risen by “several tens of centimetres”. Meanwhile, land to the north of the Estuary, such as Bexley, has gone down by maybe 10cm. Subsidence because of liquefaction is on top of that.

It remains to be seen if Monday’s shock has added to those figures, but it would be unwise to presume that things haven’t got worse. Williams also digs out the views of another Williams who is taking a precautionary view of where sea level will eventually end up:

Former Christchurch man Nigel Williams, a traffic planner who now lives in Auckland, follows Hansen’s work closely and is developing a retirement property, with solar panels, well out of harm’s way.

Williams, 64, has a blog called The 100 Metre Line, which urges people to move to higher ground while they still can. He says 10 metres above mean sea level passes through St Andrew’s College, in Papanui, and parts of Halswell.

“If by 2050 there has been half a metre of sea level rise, we’ll be up to our arses by 2100,” he says. “I’d move to Geraldine.”

Nice place, Geraldine. Any city rebuilding plan which fails to take account of projected sea level rise over the next 150 years will not be worth the paper it’s written on, but given that the process is being supervised by coal-loving former energy minister Gerry Brownlee, I don’t hold out much hope for common sense and forward thinking being properly applied. [I should note that chez Hot Topic is 170m above sea level — and a rather large earthquake-prone fault is expressed as a cliff about 30 metres from where I write this. I’m not sure which will get me first.]

]]>https://sciblogs.co.nz/hot-topic/2011/06/15/rebuilding-on-a-rising-tide/feed/0Amid carnage media bears brunt of disasterhttps://sciblogs.co.nz/griffins-gadgets/2011/02/24/amid-carnage-media-bears-brunt-of-disaster/
https://sciblogs.co.nz/griffins-gadgets/2011/02/24/amid-carnage-media-bears-brunt-of-disaster/#commentsWed, 23 Feb 2011 22:58:13 +0000https://sciblogs.co.nz/griffins-gadgets/?p=1769It was only a couple of months ago, one sunny morning that I visited science reporter Paul Gorman and tech editor Will Harvie at The Press in Christchurch.

The beautiful old building housing the newspaper was devastated in Tuesday’s earthquake and at least one of the newspaper’s staff was killed when the roof crashed down on the upstairs newsroom. This harrowing account from Vicki Anderson, music critic at The Press describes the terrifying moments as the top of the building collapsed in:

After what seemed like forever the shaking stopped and my colleagues emerged and checked each other.

“Get out,” screamed one, “stay where you are,” said another.

Somehow I had the presence of shaken mind to dig out my handbag and cellphone from the rubble.

We walked down the back stairs which were OK, as we left I looked to my right. All I could see of the busy newsroom was the roof of the three-storied building. No people in sight. I had just walked through there 10 minutes prior.

Last year I popped in to meet some of the crew at CTV, Canterbury’s dedicated and active TV channel. The team there were subscribers to the Science Media Centre’s news feeds and regularly contacted us looking for experts.

To see the building now a pile of rubble is almost beyond belief. It is human devastation and the dismantling of an organisation on a scale that I can only really compare to the footage I watched of the 9/11 World Trade Center collapse, where entire workforces and divisions of companies were wiped out.

To be a journalist at the centre of such a disaster must be a peculiar thing – and interviews with the likes of Press reporter Rebecca Todd, who was on One News this morning describing the chaotic destruction of her workplace bear that out. Despite everything, the grief, the shattered infrastructure, The Press managed to get a paper out and its team have regrouped to report on the web. As Rebecca explained, it helped them take their minds off the immediate reality of their part at the centre of the disaster.

The CTV disaster is on a different scale, as chairman Nick Smith explained on radio this morning. Of the 25 staff at the TV station, only 10 survivors made it to a meeting yesterday to regroup. Imagine that level of destruction and loss of life in the organisation you work in.

There was intense scrutiny of the media’s coverage of the first Canterbury earthquake, and for that matter Pike River.

While there have been conflicting reports and shaky live crosses in the course of coverage of this latest disaster, the New Zealand media has actually responded impressively, with dignity and respect for the people of Christchurch. Sadly, the journalists in our media organisations are becoming expert at covering disaster.

]]>https://sciblogs.co.nz/griffins-gadgets/2011/02/24/amid-carnage-media-bears-brunt-of-disaster/feed/1Kiwis’ killer heart attack recordhttps://sciblogs.co.nz/visibly-shaken/2010/04/22/kiwis-killer-heart-attack-record/
https://sciblogs.co.nz/visibly-shaken/2010/04/22/kiwis-killer-heart-attack-record/#commentsThu, 22 Apr 2010 05:27:33 +0000https://sciblogs.co.nz/editors-picks/?p=74The Press carried some sobering statistics this morning about how we are leaders among comparable countries in the developed world when it comes to dying from heart attacks.

As The Press health reporter Rebecca Todd explains:

Sixty-three New Zealanders per 100,000 die of heart attacks every year, the report on developed nations shows.

The next highest is Britain, with 45 per 100,000, while France has just 21 deaths.

For Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, the median is 44.

Here’s how The Press chose to get that across visually – does it hammer home the message?

This guest post is by David Round, lecturer in environmental law at the University of Canterbury. It first appeared in the Christchurch Press on March 18.

It was once a truth universally acknowledged that good times never last. But we now seem to consider ourselves immune from the laws of nature and history. Times have been good and getting better for most of our lifetimes. All but the very poorest of us enjoy comforts beyond our grandparents’ wildest imaginings. We cannot imagine anything but the good life.

But actions have consequences, and if even half the articles we read in this newspaper every day are actually true – and surely The Press does not lie – then chickens are rapidly coming home to roost. We face the end of cheap and abundant oil, on which our entire civilisation and way of life depends. Oil we cannot afford is, for most purposes, little different from no oil at all. No adequate substitute exists. How will we manage if we cannot even get to work in the morning, and bring the groceries from the supermarket, let alone send our goods to the other side of the world and bring large numbers of tourists here?

There is no doubt significant global climate change is happening. The “challenge” to climate change science recently whipped up by vested interests is only a quibble over a couple of footnotes. We will inevitably see more extreme weather events, crop failures, famine, economic collapse, mass population movements and war. The earth’s human population increases each year by some 90 million, all of them wanting not just life but a life as good as ours. As all of this happens, we are running out of the most basic resources; not just oil, but water, soil and fresh air.

And even nearer to hand is economic collapse, both national and international. New Zealand has been living beyond its means for decades, and sinks deeper into debt each year just to keep things ticking over. Is it possible to imagine ever paying the money back? What happens when credit dries up, as sooner or later it must?

Many other countries are already beginning to taste the crisis that awaits us. These crises, inter- related and feeding off each other, are beginning to bite now. No government can solve them. They are simply a consequence of the way we live. They are the nemesis that always follows hubris.

Two questions arise. First, is it possible to avoid this perfect storm of calamities? I doubt it. One thing alone will save us – not law, or politics, but universal and immediate self-denial and restraint in most nations, rich and poor. This will not happen. We show no inclination whatsoever to live more lightly on the Earth; indeed, quite the opposite. In any case, unless the rest of humanity were to join us at once, New Zealand would merely have put itself at a self-imposed and pointless disadvantage.

Calamity is well-nigh certain. New Zealand may not suffer as badly as many other places, but our future will be far harsher and poorer.

So, calamity is well-nigh certain. New Zealand may not suffer as badly as many other places, but our future will be far harsher and poorer. We will simply not be able to afford a fraction of today’s health, education and social welfare arrangements, holidays and recreations, luxuries or even some basic comforts. We will not be able to afford prisons, even though the crime rate will almost certainly rise. Life in large cities, in particular, will be inconvenient and unpleasant.

So the pressing second question is: how will we survive? What will we eat, and how will we obtain it? How will we make a living? Where and how will we live? Who will keep the peace and who defend us?

The simple answer is, that like most communities throughout human history, we will have to do most of these things for ourselves. This will not just be a matter of growing our own meat and vegetables, although that will be challenging enough. We will not be able to rely nearly as much on paid professionals – teachers, policemen, nurses, social workers, administrators and so on. We will have to return to older social arrangements whereby most necessary social services were provided by what Professor David Korten calls the “love economy”. Money may be involved, but these services are provided by community members, rich and poor, out of their sense of obligation to their fellow citizens.

We cannot live without social institutions, and so we must create our own. It will be difficult to fashion them from scratch, but we have many ancient models to draw on. Many of them – the forest laws, shire moot and hundred court, manors and feudal tenures, local magistrates, the posse comitatus, guilds, boroughs and local jurisdictions – we scarcely remember. Others – the family and the Church – are shadows of what they once were. We must fashion for the future, not merely recreate the past, yet when similar situations and problems arise, similar solutions naturally suggest themselves. In past social, legal, constitutional and economic arrangements, we can find ways to cope with future problems.

Our choice of future government is between a stern hierarchy and a truly vibrant, co-operative, genuine democracy. Outside these two options, there is only chaos.

We cannot even be certain that our future will be democratic. Underlying all democratic thought is the assumption of an abundance, or at least adequacy, of resources – that there will always be enough for everyone. The only issue, then, becomes one of distribution. But in a new age of scarcity, this assumption may no longer be valid. Equality will be impossible. On what principle, then, are we to administer society and ration resources? Our choice of future government is between a stern hierarchy and a truly vibrant, co-operative, genuine democracy. Outside these two options, there is only chaos.

The “precautionary principle” is a wise environmental rule. Be cautious – do not allow innovation and development unless we can be certain that what results is an improvement, or at least a situation where the good outweighs the bad. This is the only principle by which a truly sustainable society can live. It is a “conservative” principle, in the true sense of that much misunderstood word. The essence of conservatism is holding on to the past until we can be certain that the future will be better.

The radical temperament, by contrast, is arrogantly ready to jettison the painfully established institutions of the past for the dream of paradise just around the corner. But our ideas are all of a piece. We cannot, in relation to the environment, say, require that we should be cautious, while in other spheres of life we take the opposite attitude that we should be free to do whatever we like. Inevitably, one philosophy prevails. We will be conservative – conservationist – in our environmental attitudes only if we take the same conservative approach in all our living.

Ours has been a glorious age of untrammelled, irresponsible, individual liberty. This must soon end. That may perhaps seem the most grievous price of all to pay for community, and the most difficult to make, for that liberty too seems second nature to us. Yet the price must be paid.